I'm going to be hopping on the devlog train in a moment here, but before I do, I want to get this information out ASAP so that anyone interested can make arrangements sooner rather than later. And the big news is...already spoiled by the title of this post!

We'll be demoing LT again at PAX South this year! When I say we, I mean all three of us from the office here will be going, so if you'd like to praise Adam for his stupidly-fast BSPs, or Lindsey for her stupidly-fast progress on great-looking ships, or me on my stupidly-lackluster ability to meet deadlines ...you can do any or all of the above!

PAX South will be held in San Antonio, TX and will run from Friday, January 12 to Sunday, January 14. We'll be there with an LT demo all three days, although at the moment, it appears that we may be closing up early on Sunday. I'm waiting for some clarification from the Tech Park on our Sunday schedule, and will update this post & thread as soon as I know for sure. So, if you're interested/able to come, pick whichever is most convenient for you, but don't bank on us being around after ~12ish on Sunday. The cost is $40 USD for a one-day pass. Unfortunately, it appears that the three-day passes are already sold out.

As with last year, we're going as a group with the Louisiana Tech Park, so to find us you should look for some kind of signage related to "Louisiana Tech Park," "Baton Rouge Game Developers," or possibly "New Orleans Game Developers"...and of course, we will have a smaller sign with "Limit Theory" on it. Our setup will likely be a mounted HD TV with a gamepad, since we'll be pressed for space.

The Demo

As of this week we've started planning out and sprinting on features for the LT PAX demo. Naturally, since LT isn't ready to play yet (nor would the full game make for a compelling five-minute demo experience), our demo will aim to give 'a taste' of Limit Theory in a format that's more amenable to picking up a gamepad for a few minutes and having some fun. It will be unequivocally superior to last year's "war of the box 'ships' demo."

If all goes according to plan, we'll be showing off a combat demo wherein you must defend against progressively-more-difficult waves of attacking ships. Successful defense rewards the player with credits that can be used to purchase upgrades to weaponry, consumable items, full-ship upgrades, new AI teammates, and possibly more All of this will, of course, be happening in procedurally-generated systems with procedural asteroid fields, planets, nebulae, and (possibly) stations (although they may be of the 'old' variety since Lindsey is focused on ships at the moment).

Additionally, since Lindsey has made great progress with ships, we'll be integrating a 'ship generator UI' that allows for customization of the generating parameters, so that you can play around with customizing your ship and seeing the PCG work in real-time! She's got some great ideas concerning how we might even save the best user-generated ships so that they continue to pop up throughout the day (you may come back to find someone piloting or fighting a ship that you custom-generated!)

If you've got reasonable ideas/feature requests for the demo that you think would be fun for people to see, please post in the official LT PAX Demo Suggestions thread, but please read the first post before doing so!

If you're able to make it, then we look forward to meeting you! Otherwise, fret not, for there will surely be an abundance of shinies from the ordeal, including an endless fountain of screenies, some real-life pictures so you can see just how photogenic we programmers are, and hopefully some video capture of user play sessions.

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford

"You’ve got to work on something dangerous. You have to work on something that makes you uncertain. Something that makes you doubt yourself... because it stimulates you to do things you haven’t done before. The whole thing is if you know where you’re going, you’ve gone, as the poet says. And that’s death."
- Stephen Sondheim

A lot of people have it set up so that the forum sends emails whenever a new thread/post is posted in the announcement board at all, so I don't think it's something to be too worried about. It's just one email, after all. Live and learn.

I managed to find a twitch streamer who took a quick look at the LT booth. It looks like they have the combat demo from last year up along with Lindsey's ship algorithm. And, if I'm not mistaken Adam is on the show floor chatting about the game and explaining it to those who are interested.

The streamer said he'd be taking a more in depth look at Limit Theory and other indi games tomorrow morning.